134 of you, to be exact, have already donated to the making
of BOX, along with our Corporate Angel, SONY. We are so grateful. Thank you so much!

And now for Camera news:

With much aid from our extremely talented Director of
photography, we have acquired the use of the SONY F65 camera! Along with a
camera package (lenses, etc.), that requires a truck to haul the many cases.
Our DP is so respected and admired that she and Sony have partnered and Sony
will be using footage from BOX to promote this camera, along with making a
behind-the-scenes movie of the making-of-the-movie. We are one of the earliest
short films to be given this opportunity. Mr. M. Night Shyamalan is shooting
his current feature film on the Sony F65 right now. Increased depth of field
and many new features will make the Sony F65 the industry standard for digital
movie making. (Until something else comes along, one imagines…)

BOX is a short film about people craving intimacy. How they
suffer when intimacy is lost. How they succeed when they live inside of it. And
how, possibly, the ones who are good at it can help the ones who are not so
good.

Zak and Paula are married but they barely understand each
other. Zak has an appointment with Peter, a man in a gender neutral
outfit, who attempts to help him.

Helen works with Peter to help Zak find his way and lends
her special magic to all she encounters. Will Helen and Peter’s simple gift of
a Box reveal a new way forward for Paula? Maybe…

All in eleven minutes at three locations. (A kitchen, a
warehouse and a beautiful Seventeenth Century Dutch Stone Farmhouse on Five
Acres with a pond and gardens.)

A shout of gratitude to Mink Stole of John Waters fame and
Lou Liberatore from the original Broadway cast of Burn This who are playing Helen and Peter. To our leads, Marsha
Dietlein Bennett and Dylan Chalfy, who are playing Paula and Zak, a wildly
talented pair. To extremely talented newcomer, Andreas Damm. To Jendra
Jarnagin, our wonderful Director of Photography, Sony darling, whose work can
be seen in the above video. Chrissy Conant, installation artist and painter,
will be our production designer. Micah Bloomberg, the fantastic Indie Film
Sound King (FrozenRiver, Martha Marcy May Marlene) has joined our crew. Mark Repasky,
editor at large at Showtime, will pull it all together in post. As Associate
Producer, Rebecca Israel is going to keep us all on track the days of the
shoot, the first week of May along with Co-Producer Matthew Weiner and
Assistant Director, Darren Bartlett. And, you! We want you to be a part
of this process.

This budget will cover:

Five Actors

CoProducer

Associate Producer

Assistant Director

Director of Photography

First Assistant Camera

Second Assistant Camera

Sound

Gaffer (lights)

Grip (muscle)

Swing (Gaffer and Grip helper)

3 PA’s

Production Designer

Two Set Dressers/Props

Wardrobe

Casting Director

Rental space for Casting

Sets-Props

Hair-Makeup

Script Supervisor

D.I.T. (Digital management)

Hard Drives

Transportation (Passenger Van, Cube truck)

Steadicam

Equipment rental

Food

Editor

Sound Mixer

Insurance

DVD copies

And SOME festival fees

(Feel free to use this list to make your own movie!)

Everyone involved is a full career level professional who is
joining this project based on the script and on us.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

So many of you have been so generous, it is rather ridiculous. THANK YOU! 113 of you, to be exact, have donated to the making of Box, along with our Corporate Angel, SONY. We are so grateful.

OUR COSTS have ballooned to 19K because of some great news. We have acquired from Sony the use of the SONY F65 camera! And a camera package (lenses, etc.). It’s kinda nuts-lucky. Our Director of Photography is so respected and admired, that she and Sony have partnered and Sony will be using footage from BOX to promote this camera. We are one of the earliest short films to be given this opportunity. Mr. M. Night Shyamalan is shooting his current feature film on the Sony F65 right now. Increased depth of field and many new features will make the Sony F65 the industry standard for digital movie making. (Until something else comes along, one imagines…)

So, we can’t scrimp on staff and design…and we are not. The crew is top notch and everyone is working for peanuts. But those allergens add up…and it has become clear, with our actualized budget, that we need 19,000 dollars worth of those peanuts.

We are two weeks away from closing out this successful campaign, but we still need help getting there.

Many of you have contributed already. So thank you again! Perhaps you would consider forwarding this email to a few fun friends or post this link on one of your many cool social sites:

Some of you are feeling the pinch of these silly economic times…and we totally get it and we thank you for being so positive and supportive in your enthusiasm for our movie. Would you please post this link on one of your many cool social sites?

BOX is a short film about people craving intimacy. How they suffer when intimacy is lost. How they succeed when they live inside of it. And how, possibly, the ones who are good at it can help the ones who are not so good.

Zak and Paula are married but they barely understand each other. Zak has an appointment with Peter, a man in a gender neutral outfit, who attempts to help him.

Helen works with Peter to help Zak find his way and lends her special magic to all she encounters. Will Helen and Peter’s simple gift of a Box reveal a new way forward for Paula? Maybe…

All in eleven minutes at three locations. (A kitchen, a warehouse and a beautiful Seventeenth Century Dutch Stone Farmhouse on Five Acres with a pond and gardens.)

What We Need & What You Get

OUR GOAL

is to shoot this movie with great artistic integrity. To that end, we are surrounding ourselves with professional talent of the highest caliber, from actors to the director of photography. To pay everyone, down to the newest PA who has just arrived in town. To submit to festivals. And to develop and produce more films with intelligence and sensitivity.

Short movies do not get made by studios. They get made by people like you. By people like us. We need your help.

We have a full crew and the beginnings of a great cast. A shout of gratitude to Mink Stole of John Waters fame and Lou Liberatore from the original Broadway cast of Burn This (with John Malkovich and Joan Allen), who are playing Helen and Peter. To Cindi Rush, casting director, who is working on offers to name talent for Zak and Paula. To Jendra Jarnagin, our wonderful Director of Photography, Sony darling, whose work can be seen in the above video. Chrissy Conant, installation artist and painter, will be our production designer. Micah Bloomberg, the fantastic Indie Film Sound King (FrozenRiver, Martha Marcy May Marlene) has joined our crew. Mark Repasky, editor at large at Showtime, will pull it all together in post. As Associate Producer, Rebecca Israel is going to keep us all on track the days of the shoot, the first week of May. And, you! We want you to be a part of this process.

This budget will cover:

Five Actors

Associate Producer

Assistant Director

Director of Photography

First Assistant Camera

Second Assistant Camera

Sound

Gaffer (lights)

Grip (muscle)

Swing (Gaffer and Grip helper)

2 PA’s

Production Designer

Set Dresser and Props

Wardrobe

Casting Director

Rental space for Casting

Sets-Props

Hair-Makeup

Script Supervisor

D.I.T. (Digital management)

Hard Drives

Transportation (Passenger Van, Cube truck)

Steadicam

Equipment rental

Food

Editor

Sound Mixer

Insurance

DVD copies

And SOME festival fees

(Feel free to use this list to make your own movie!)

Everyone involved is a full career level professional who is joining this project based on the script and on us. Your money will be stretched, paying 1970s fees (the golden age of cinema) for a present day movie.

Author Marian Fontana knows funny and she is bringing together a great group of comic writers for this night of hilarity with Don Cummings, Blair Fell, Ellen Ferguson, Billy Frolick, Gianna Messina & Marian Fontana

.

BIOS OF THE PERFORMERS:

DON CUMMINGS' critically acclaimed plays have been produced on both coasts: His play, The Fat of the Land was a semifinalist for the Kaufman & Hart Award for new American comedy. A Good Smoke was a semifinalist for the Eugene O'Neill theater conference. It had a reading at The Public Theater in New York starring Meryl Streep and Debra Monk and has been optioned for Broadway. Piss Play is about Minorities so it's Really Important was produced in the Summer Cringe Festival of 2009 where it received the Golden Pineapple award for best play. His latest play, Live Work Space, opens soon in Los Angeles. His collection of nonfiction essays are loosely held together in his yet-to-be-published memoir, Open Trench, named after his blog. He has acted in a lot of plays and been on a lot of sitcoms and writes movies and TV shows. Mr. Cummings is a graduate of TuftsUniversity, The Neighborhood Playhouse and a member of The Dramatists Guild and the Ensemble Studio Theater Writer's Unit. www.doncummings.net

I WILL BE READING "The Front Row"---a story about choosing the wrong best friends out of convenience.

BLAIR FELL has written for the television series Queer As Folk, and the emmy-award winning Public Television show California Connected. His plays Naked Will, The Tragic and Horrible Life of the Singing Nun, From The Hip, Bargains and Blood, The Ballad of Little Girl Jesus et al have been performed around the world and have received numerous
awards. He has written charity and award show speeches for hundreds of celebrities, as well as the GLAAD Awards, Vimeo Awards and The Trevor Project. Along with writing for a number of pop culture websites, he writes a fiction blog called subwaysaints.com and the web series Burninghabits.com. His work can also be seen on blairfell.com.

ELLEN FERGUSON writes the "Diversity in the News" column for McSweeney's, and her nonfiction has also been published in Diversity Prep, Publisher's Weekly, and SPY. Her McSweeney's column has been widely reprinted online. Her poetry can be found online on identitytheory and the Brooklyn Reading Works, and in print in Long Island Quarterly. Before she started teaching English, Satire and Nonfiction in New Jersey and New Hampshire, she worked at The New Yorker Magazine and SPY.

MARIAN FONTANA has been a writer and performer for over 20 years. Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and most recently in the Guardian and on Salon.com. Her memoir, A Widows Walk published in 2005 by Simon and Schuster, was chosen as the Top Ten Great Reads of 2005 by People magazine and the Washington Post's Book Raves of 2005. She most recently completedher second memoir, The Middle of the Bed. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Time of My Life for Random House. She is currently collaborating on a musical.

BILLY FROLICK'S screenwriting credits include DreamWorks Animation's MADAGASCAR. He has written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and Salon.com, and is the author of four book-length parodies, including The Ditches of Edison County, a national bestseller.

GIANNA MESSINA is a writer, producer and comedian who got her start as a baby model. Her work has appeared in Dossier and Atlanta Style & Design magazine. She has performed stand-up at the Punchline in Atlanta and at the Metropolitan Room in New York and co-hosted the No Rules radio show with comedian Stu Levine. She is a graduate of Syracuse University Crouse College of Art and the High School for the Performing Arts where she majored in Drama. Gianna lives with her cat Clementine in Brooklyn in order to be closer to good bread and cannoli. She is gluten-free intolerant, enjoys the 3rdperson format of biographies and blogging on giannamessina.com.

EXPERIENCE Brooklyn Reading Works, the reading series that has been called "The best place to chase fiction with a bit of history" by Conde Nast Traveler. "Once a month you can hear writers discuss themes ranging from "Make Mine a Double" - on women and drinking - to books by war veterans."

BRW is a great night out for anyone who wants to be entertained and enlightened by acclaimed and emerging authors, and meet others who enjoy the same.

A $5 donation includes refreshments and wine.

The Old Stone House

336 Third Street

Between Fifth and Fourth Avenues

Park Slope, BrooklynNY11215

Due to construction in the park, enter from the Fourth Avenue side of the house.

I’ll stop now because it is 3AM and I have to drag my tired lapsed ass to bed.

(Can something that never really was be lapsed?)

Okay, I have to drag my familial historical Catholic ass to bed.

But before I do, let me say this—

These wacky talented Canadians, via La Jolla Playhouse, directed by Des McAnuff, most of them making their Broadway debuts, were frigging fabulous.

The set was like the inside of a black and silver Motorola Android phone. Big on the Superstar part. Jesus countdown news crawling across a horizontal crawler (in lights, you know, like news)…fun as hell. (As heaven?)

Jesus played it all caged animal-like.

Judas was played by the understudy. Amazing voice.

Jesus, too---amazing singer.

Mary M, not as well.

I loved this music as a kid and I still do. It’s modern chords, with rock music and it’s sort of nasty good crucifixion fun.

As Joan Didion penned, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

At the end of the play, the words of the Gospels, lit up, crawled all over the set, moving across so you could almost read them, filling the walls. Like, this Jesus death set the tongue waggers on fire. It was powerful, moving. Not just for the Gospels but because, fundamentally, people must write and say so much stuff in order to craft their way out of the madness.

But moving away from Joan and Jesus, really---it’s about the music. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber (Who once asked a friend, “Why do people take an immediate dislike to me?” and the friend answered, “Because it saves time.”)—Sir A.L.W., in my opinion, wrote his best music here, mostly because the chords here are closer and the rhythm structures more contrapuntal than in anything else he has put together.

Jesus be damned, I like a good rock opera. Ann Margaret rolling in beans, what-have-you…

Deal is, we love the movie. The simplicity. And they did not muck it up beyond atrocious. Though, they did change the “Girl” role into a plucky pixie savior in a much more obvious way than the movie did. Like Santorum, the powers-that-be mucked with the integrity of the woman more than the man.

Remember when you used to say, “I loved the book. The movie wasn’t as good?”

Now it’s, “I loved the movie. But I didn’t like the musical as much.”

The play grew on me by the middle of Act II. It’s always fantastic to hear extremely talented musicians musish.

The actors on stage played all the instruments, and well. Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti as the leads were lovely, if not really in any way that hot for each other.

The new musical arrangements worked well for a live audience. I did not enjoy the silly dancing here and there…part River Dance, part Spring Awakening.

Is it worth seeing? I don’t know… It’s slow. Maybe a little too slow. I actually would not have minded the slowness had the director and writers brought out more of the true dilemma of these two…which would be real vulnerability in a tough world and the tough situation they have with each other, not being available for relationship while falling in love. The writers (producers?) forced gag lines into the first act, pandering to the audience, which did not help to develop the tone they needed to make this truly effective. Sad, that.

There were some really bad jokes about potatoes and other Irishy stuff. Too bad. Wasn't needed at all.

But I don’t go to musicals for the play or for the acting, both of which are often cartoonish. It’s about the music. And in this case, the music is pretty superb so I am glad I went.

And since I am 3/8 Irish, I feel these sorts of things in a real way. At least I feel about 3/8 of it.

Ultimately, the movie was better. But you knew that even before you started reading this.